Steam charts: ~ 7000 players

"

dspair wrote:

"

Dynuel wrote:

- Steam to standalone client users ratio is changing for the advantage of the standalone client, therefore steam charts are more dramatic than the reality.

[citation needed]

"

If you want these charts to be a meaningful representation of use / decline of use, you need to weight them with the steam global achievement ratios.

As of right now, 37.5% of the playerbase that these charts are based on has killed merveil, and 13.5% has finished the game on normal difficulty on a non-hardcore league. Less than half have the achievement for killing brutus.

The charts by themselves look dramatic, but are not representative of trends in people actually playing the game on their own, and seeing them presumed to be such is getting tiring.

Edit: http://steamgraph.net/index.php?action=graph&appid=238960q72850 is much more useful as far as steam graphs go.

You can change the graph timeline and still see a rather slow regression of active playerbase influenced by other game releases and main patch releases.

Edit: Sorry for double post.

"

dspair wrote:

I don't get it. Yes, steam charts do show that player base is decreasing. What achievements have to do with anything? >85% of players quit the game before beating the normal difficulty, how that proves that people use standalone client more and more instead of steam?

Again, how convenient that GGG removed the "/online" command, now GGG defence force™ can sleep at night, dreaming about increasing player base on standalone client.

Blizzard Drone™ much? :P

It is explained in the quote. We want to see the actual stable playerbase instead of the jumpy steam population, trying out every new patch in any advertised F2P game. Steam Achievements are a measure of time investment and therefore can reflect the loyal customers. Once there we can guess that Native Client data looks similar, although they do not include Russian or Asian numbers (which might be a big piece of the cake).

We can also better see active playerbase retention without colliding with simple marketing effects like a huge new player flush due to expansion advertisements and the natural loss of said new players due to disinterest. As you see there are good reasons to weight the variables using steam achievements.

At the end the active playerbase pays the maintenance bills whereas the flush of new players including stash tab sales might boost short time profit and development. The weighted sample looks not as frightening as the unweighted but it still shows retention. However as a business man, I would only consider stable customer bases as present numbers on finances for future development. Probably fault on me, I know. ;-)

We know that the stable customer base is at most about 3000 at a time without valuing in time zones/concurrency and the native client user base, which is naturally higher than the steam client user base (daily/weekly average way higher). As this is a F2P game, we also know that only a small percentage of this user base is finally a paying customer, however skewed towards the big whale kinda guys paying way higher amounts than the small fish. Natural purchase justification processes will keep it this way. We also know that GGG currently is holding a 30+ employee office in this situation.

The high amount of content GGG is delivering fast in this situation is astonishing and I can see people being fascinated about it. However as pointed out, daily/weekly concurrency is way higher (steam shows at least 7000 users) not including native client numbers which will be higher because of the east asian/russian playerbase. The working system is not a miracle and it reflects the solid polish of this product compared to alternative products.

Does all this look depressing/dangerous to you? If yes, then you are probably conservative about purchase models and I kinda understand this. However it is a working model and you'd be surprised about the amount of F2P games out there with a way lower active player base being able to maintain their game.


I hope this post made you understand my relaxed position a bit. <3

"

dspair wrote:

"

Xavderion wrote:

Quotes from Chris:

"

The ratio of steam to non-steam players can change over time based on environmental factors. At release it was about 50/50, due to heavy promotion on their front page. There are a lot more people playing on our platform than on Steam currently.

and

"

Online concurrency varies between 15k (at totally off-peak times while America/Europe are asleep) to up to around 50-60k at peak times or big releases.

The second quote means Steam:non-Steam ratio is around 30:70 at the moment, which means more Steam players than non-Steam players quit the game, which means the Steam chart isn't representative of the whole player base.

Okay, some actual numbers, still nothing about increasing number of players using stand alone client, just the ratio between steam and standalone. And "/online" still doesn't work, so we have to search for THAT ONE POST on the forum where Chris posts half of the data once a year. I guess we will never see the full picture again. Is counting players in real time as hard as fixing desync?

The command was certainly taken away so Einstein's like us don't jump to conclusion without knowing concepts like concurrent user numbers or casual players only playing once a week but regular so.

As for the first sentence: I see no one mentioning increased base player numbers. Not in the OP, not in the parts you quoted. If you read the initial statement again, it says that Steam Player:Stand-Alone Player ratio is increasing towards Stand-Alone Player. This can also happen if only Steam Player numbers shrink, you see?

Imagine we have two pies. Apple Pie and Cherry Pie. You now only eat from the Apple Pie. Of course the Cherry Pie is now greater than the Apple Pie. Now imagine that you eat from both pies, from the small Apple Pie always two pieces of pie more than from the big Cherry Pie. The Cherry Pie will be way bigger than the Apple Pie and getting bigger although both lose their pieces.

Player regression is likely affecting both Clients, I agree. However we don't know about the amount of regression present in the Stand-Alone client and furthermore the Stand-Alone client holds a higher player base because of reasoning explained earlier (Russian/East Asian Players).

We can only speculate whereas GGG has the numbers and are running their business as always with altered communication (more Support taking up Dev communication; lack of early Patch Notes due to user feedback). One can get into a negative mindset fast into this forum, also explained in the OP. But it is only the reality of a small percentage of PoE players, last numbers showing only 5% of concurrent users using the forum and even less posting, also kinda observable in "user polls" created on here all the time. However the majority of active players are busy playing the product.

"

dspair wrote:

"

sidtherat wrote:

playerbase is easiest to judge by chat traffic and poe.xyz items. it looks bad. inb4 whiteknights 'but not everybody use it' - so you say that traders/not-traders ratio changed recently? [citation needed]!

That's an interesting idea, poe.xyz.is should share some statistics. They've already replaced a non-existing trading system, now they can replace the non-existing player data. Give it a few years and fans will remake PoE without desync.

Your love for the suggestion that we shall use poe.xyz stats instead of steam stats is funny. You know that poe.xyz requires forum interaction and you know that the forum user numbers are low as shit and likely have discerning features compared to the non-forum using player population. What do you want to confirm so desperately? That you are missing some dudes in your friendslist? Get new people to play with! That your guild is empty? Mine is not, surprise, surprise!

Sorry for the Wall of Text but seriously, if you browse the forum regular, you know that the game died 10 times already. The business is still running and content is produced, so what do you fear?